Danger part of the job

The life of a hard rock miner is a tough one. Anything can change in a split second underground.

Danger abounds when you mix explosives with heavy equipment and, of course, the always unpredictable Mother Earth.

For those who live their lives topside, it is hard to imagine how rock is a living and ever-changing creature, but miners certainly know this nature.

One of the deadliest underground hazards is the looming rock bursts - I've lived through a small one. They occur frequently in the Silver Valley mines, but there are many, many other dangers as well.

I worked for nearly three years underground at the Sunshine Mine and I had my fair share of brushes with death. I count my blessings on a regular basis that I had the opportunity to learn from those experiences.

Being forced to learn from the death of a fellow miner sends a chill down any miner's spine and wrenches our hearts with grief.

I lost a friend at the Sunshine Mine in 1989, I believe, to a freak accident that washed out the head frame of an ore pocket that my friend Mark Randless was sitting on while pulling muck with his partner that day.

Mark and I went through North Idaho College's first mine training program together at the Atlas Mine in Mullan back in 1988. When we graduated from that class, we both got jobs at Sunshine and carpooled to work on most days.

That day started out like any other day. We were on the Bull Gang, which is where the new grunts start underground. On the Bull Gang you are assigned a shift boss, or 'shifter,' who gives you a daily work task like hauling ore on a train or shipping supplies underground: pretty much anything except for drilling and blasting.

I caught a lucky break that day. I went to check in with my shifter and learned that I was put in the miners training program, so I was off the Bull Gang.

Randless, however, was sent to pull muck. Had I remained on the Bull Gang, I most likely would have been working with him that day.

I knew Randless' partner as Wilcox - I'm not sure I ever knew his first name - and he was as tough as nails.

Their job that day was shipping ore out of the mine - or 'pulling muck' as they call it underground - in the No. 12 shaft area of the mine. The ore pocket was filled with an unusual amount of water that day and made the otherwise rocky ore a soupy slurry.

They were filling the buckets on a counter-balanced, double-drum hoist in the shaft. That means while one bucket was underneath one miner being filled with ore, the other bucket was at the top of the shaft dumping its load of ore.

The accident occurred when Wilcox was filling his bucket, and Mark's bucket was at the top of the shaft. Wilcox closed the hydraulic gate on his ore chute, and the force of the rock slurry behind the gate washed out the head frame that held tons of ore behind the two miners.

Mark, may he rest in peace, was washed down the shaft to his death. Wilcox was washed into his hoist bucket, which was headed up the shaft to dump. He was able to stop the hoist before he was dumped by grabbing a bell cord in the shaft. The bell cord is how the miners communicate with the hoist operator.

It was a tragic day and one I will never forget - especially when accidents are announced like the one that took Nick Rounds' life on Monday.

My heart goes out to Nick Rounds, his family and all of the miners who will now have to suck it up and head down the hole with this tragedy in the back of their minds.

Just be careful down there my friends.